If you have some time to spare, you owe it to yourself to check out the Guardian's choice passages from the upcoming autobiography of The Fall frontman Mark E. Smith. Among the smorgasboard of topics are selling Playboy pages to schoolmates (but conning them with the articles), why he preferred LSD to pot, his odd jobs as a plumber, why he found John Lennon arrogant, and, perhaps most interestingly, his take on the early punk scene. A couple of excerpts:

The Fall just came about, really, with four of us holed up in that flat, doing our thing. Martin Bramah was the singer because he had the looks, Tony Friel was the bass player, I played the guitar and Una had the keyboards, once she had saved up to buy them. As far as I was concerned, it wasn't about trying to get our pictures in some paper or magazine or other -- like it is with a lot of bands nowadays -- it was because of sounds, of wanting to make something, to combine primitive music with intelligent lyrics. The punk scene had just started, and when I first saw the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in '76, I thought, "My lot are not as bad as that. We're better. We just need a drummer." So we got one in: a little bald man from Stockport called Dave.

 A lot of people have lumped us in with punk, but I've never aligned myself with it. I didn't want to be part of a scene, never have. And I knew it wasn't going to last. Once that quick statement was over, most of the main players couldn't handle the fall-out: they were like a bunch of shell-shocked army majors stuck in time, endlessly repeating their once-successful war cries. When you're dealing in slogans like the Clash and the Pistols, it's hard to keep that shit fresh.